My grandmother’s daily task of deciding what to cook drew heavy sighs and a shaking of her head. She would extract money from her slim purse and instruct me to buy R1’s worth of short rib or pork shank, maybe some cabbage or carrots, depending on what she already had in the pantry.

At nine years old, I vowed that one day I would give my grandmother lots of money to buy the Eisbein she loved, and also some fried fish, and the hamburgers which my uncle Joey brought from the drive-in every fortnight. She ate those with such enjoyment, because, she explained, she didn’t have to cook it herself. But until I was old enough to give her what she wanted, I demanded my 5 cents for a bag of crisps. It was my reward for going to the shops so she wouldn’t have to leave the house.

One of the highlights was when my grandmother dished up at supper time. Sometimes she would ladle her chicken curry on mealie-rice, alongside sweet pumpkin. Other times, when the beef stew bolstered with Bisto and onion was done, she would place a flour mixture on top, so that when she served, the dumplings were still fluffy and light. On cooler days, she would make roosterkoek directly on the plates of the coal stove and I would slather mine in apricot jam. The fragrant stews or curries were served on mismatched plates and in bowls which were often chipped. Disparate knives, spoons and forks laid next to the plates. Sometimes there were stubborn chicken curry and beetroot stains on the tablecloth which resisted my grandmother’s scrubbing. In places the fabric was threadbare but it was always clean and freshly ironed. The cracked linoleum that covered the squeaky wooden floor, the mint green dresser and the eclectic collection of chairs around the kitchen table, the coal stove and the pot plant on the windowsill formed the backdrop against which we played out our daily lives.

On crisp winter mornings, the fumes from my grandfather’s El Camino would drift through the kitchen door while he sipped his tea, waiting for the engine to warm. Cubes of butter were plopped into steaming oatmeal before it was doused with milk and then encrusted with sugar. I would shuffle sleepily into the kitchen, the childlike wonder and excitement of early morning unfurling in my belly. The hushed way in which my grandparents moved and talked felt like I was being let in on the magical things they had been up to while the rest of the household slumbered. My grandmother would look up from putting my grandfather’s six sandwiches, wrapped in wax wrap, into his little suitcase, next to his bottle of tea. Her eyes would soften as she greeted me. My grandfather would say, “Good morning, Ouvrou, (old woman) are you up already?”. Through drowsy eyes. I would take them in: my ’dad’ in his blue overalls and frowning work shoes and my short, stout little ’mom’ in her worn gown and slippers.

After dinner, the kitchen would possess a languid air. My Aunt Muriel and her husband necked in front of the coal stove and later I would hear their bed springs squeak. Aunt Muriel was the second youngest of my grandmother’s children and only thirteen years older than me. She was one of my misery-makers. At eight months old, she had a lack of oxygen to the brain which left her with a vicious temper and an insatiable need for stimulation; sexual and otherwise. Muriel was a drama-generator. She merely had to enter a room for everyone to know that trouble was smirking in the corner, waiting to join forces with Muriel.

Whenever Muriel was slicing bread, someone would be forced to take their health into their own hands and say, “Muriel, don’t cut the bread so thick.” Muriel would ignore them because she liked ’doorsteps’, upon which she piled her hot chips. The bottom part of her face would be happily chomping away, while two hostile eyes in the top part would be trained on anyone approaching her for a chip or two.

The kitchen was the room in which most criticisms and insults were launched. Sometimes the angry invectives would hang in the air for days until a remorseful glance or a peace offering, such as a cup of tea, would vanquish them from the atmosphere, but not from the bitter hearts which coddled them.

On Fridays my grandmother didn’t have to fuss about what to cook. The standard fare was fried liver and onions. I hated liver and waited till my grandfather popped my 50 cents pocket money into my hand from his weekly pay packet. I would fly down the footpath across the veldt, my bare feet hardly touching ground, and return with my two favourite things: a Russian sausage and a black and white picture book. The vinegar would be dripping out of the corner of the small paper bag. I would break the tight skin with my teeth, the flavour bursting into my mouth. Afterward, I would hop onto my single bed, which stood adjacent to my grandparent’s double one and lose myself in the adventures of my heroes.

At about eight o’ clock, I would be summoned to the kitchen to tell my most recent jokes or recite Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd…..”. I loved the attention as much as Muriel did it seemed and I didn’t mind that it was coming from a bunch of grey-haired drunk folk. My grandfather held me in the circle of his arm and proudly looked on, mouthing the words with me in silent encouragement.

Some Saturday mornings, at 2am, as I would lay in shallow sleep, my grandmother’s head would be slumping close to the overflowing ashtray, her index and middle fingers stained with nicotine. Her hair, which she had purple rinsed and set the day before, would hang limply in her eyes, heavy breasts resting on the kitchen table. Her words would blend and sway, revealing the resentment and self-pity growing beneath her skin. My grandfather, trying to sleep off the Klipdrift would stomp down the passage in his y-fronts and vest. She had scoffed at his numerous invitations to come to bed one time too many. As the first slap landed, she would scream for me. My grandfather would stop hitting her if I entered the room and my presence would prevent him from dragging her to the bedroom.

At about eight the next morning, my gran would shuffle into the kitchen in her faded housedress and slippers, holding her empty water glass and the ashtray from next to her bed, in her hands. Sometimes her eye would be black or she would cradle an injured shoulder or hip. The misery of the kitchen’s occupants was absorbed in its cold white walls and an abandoned feeling prevailed. The linoleum would be sticky from spilt alcohol, a sour smell emanating from it along with the bitter odour of stale smoke. The silence was interrupted only by my grandmother’s sighs and sometimes a sharp intake of breath as she leaned dutifully forward and poked at the coals to start the fire. Next would be the splish-splash of water from the bathroom, indicating that my grandfather was going through his morning routine of washing his face and rinsing his glass eye before replacing it along with his heavy black framed glasses. I sneered at my grandmother and would carry out any instructions reluctantly. I hated the martyrdom which she wore like a crown. I wanted to rip it off her head and scream, “It’s your own fault, you don’t know when to shut up”.

My grandfather would stride briskly into the kitchen. Silver hair, Bryl-creamed, and with fresh short pants and mid-calf socks, he would say he is going to buy spark plugs (which meant I couldn’t go with) and ask my gran if she needed anything from the shop. She’d say he needed to bring milk, and that she didn’t know what he wanted for supper. Translated that meant she didn’t know what he wanted to drink later, because though her dignity lay in tatters and her aching body housed a broken heart, she knew the only escape from her life would be through drinking with her intimate enemy again that night.

My grandfather would return with a loaf of bread and some steak wrapped in brown paper from the butcher, along with the rest of the supplies. Just to let him know I was onto him, I would ask innocently where the spark plugs were. He would smile and say I was “too big for my boots”; a sentiment which every adult in my environment would echo at intervals throughout my childhood. He would clunk the pan down on the stove, drizzle some oil and drop the steak in. While it was sizzling, he would place the warm bread on the breadboard and cut thick slices whilst the doughy insides collapsed under the gentle pressure of his hand. The delicious, reassuring smells of yeast and frying meat would fill the air and the kitchen wouldn’t be such a sad room anymore. I would salivate as our eyes met and he smiled, knowing I was going to want the crust. When the meat was ready he would pour some of the oil and burnt bits of fat on top of the steak along with some Worcestershire sauce. Then he and I would dunk bits of bread in the oil from the plate we shared and he would cut off small pieces of steak for me.

Many Sunday nights, I would hover around the kitchen as my uncle Joey made toasted ham and cheese sandwiches for Marvin, hoping for a portion to land up in my lunch box, it was a far cry from peanut butter and Marmite. Marvin, whose ferocious appetite for anything he could smoke, eat, drink, or screw, could never be satiated anyway. Unlucky for me, Joey didn’t have to pack lunch too often, because Marvin seldom had a job to go to. But Joey would find other things for Marvin to do, other things to buy for him, other ways to try and secure the acceptance, love and faithfulness which never came.

God decided to bless my grandparent’s union with six children. In my opinion, they were supposed to all be girls, but in order to liven things up a bit, He gave Joey a penis, along with the wrong balance of hormones. To boot, God launched Joey onto the planet during a time when he could be jailed for wanting to be a girl, so Joey’s journey was littered with drama, intensity and huge amounts of effort to hide his true feelings from himself and others. He was also appointed as one of my safe-keepers.

On school days, God would sometimes schedule me in and approve my request of “please don’t let her be drunk, please don’t let her be drunk” as I walked home. On those days, my grandmother and I would sit in quiet companionship as I did my homework and she peeled potatoes. A wire hanger served as an aerial so that we could listen to Esme Everard who shared household tips and recipes on Springbok Radio. Grumbling, the boiling rice would send plumes of steam into the air. Every now and then, the drone of a lonely aircraft from the nearby air-force base would cleave the clear blue skies, reminding us of what tiny little blips we were on the vast radar of forever. Sometimes, as I walked by myself across the veldt, with those endless, open skies above me and not a soul around, I felt so insignificant that I wondered if I existed at all.

We populated many different kitchens for the first eleven years of my life. My grandfather, whose restlessness could be detected in the way that he would bite down on his molars so that his jaw muscles were constantly moving, took us wherever there was work, or that was the story anyway. Perhaps he was seeking geographical cures but answers to what ailed him could not be found in a different province. The teetotaller he had married in his double-breasted suit, his hair smartly slicked back, his heart alive with hope and intention, was so unhappy that she drank secretly and the guilt he carried because he thought he was responsible, fuelled the tension he tried so desperately to outrun.

My knowledge of food is quite limited. As a child we weren’t exposed to a wide variety of different kinds of food. My mother loved gardening and used to plant vegetables in the garden of our home. Therefore, as a child, her vegetables were the only kind of food I was familiar with. There were also animals at home; cows, sheep and some chickens. Whenever one of the cows had new calves, we were always excited because that meant a change in our daily diet; from eating mom’s vegetables to now having fresh milk from the cow.

So it was humiliating for me when I went out on a date with a new boyfriend I had met on campus during my first year of study. Khettie was his name. He took me to a very nice restaurant. It was spring and the weather was lovely, but since I didn’t have any pretty dresses, I’d had difficulty in finding a proper dress for the date that morning. Anyway, I just wore one of my simple summer dresses. The restaurant was in town, which meant we had to take a taxi from Roma, where the university is, to Maseru.

When we arrived, we were welcomed by a waiter, who ushered us to our seats. We were then given big books which I learned later on were the ones where the menus were written. Inside the restaurant, the food smelled nice, it was quiet and calm. Khettie took the menu and after peeping through, raised his hand and called upon the waiter. He then asked me if I was ready to make my order. I shook my head and said, ‘You can go ahead, I’m still deciding what I will take.’ I was clueless about what kind of food I should choose: I honestly had no idea at all what to order. I went back to the book in front of my eyes, staring at what was written, trying hard to search for any word familiar to me; but all the words were new to me.

Now my heart started beating hard. I then listened to Khettie ordering. ‘Pizza,’ he said. So I said to myself, I shall order pizza too even though I don’t  know what it is. I then proudly raised my hand and looking at Khettie, said, ‘I’m ready to order.’ When the waiter came, I happily said, ‘I will take pizza.’ The waiter then asked me which one. I was puzzled for I didn’t know they were of different kinds. So I just told the waiter that I would have the same one Khettie had ordered. I was also asked which drink I wanted. Ooh my goodness here we go again, I said to myself. Since I only knew Coke, even though I hadn’t liked it the first time I had tasted it, I asked for Coke – because I didn’t know what else to say.

As we sat together keeping each other company, Khettie broke the ice between us and asked me what I liked doing during my spare time on campus. I told him I loved going to the library, though I didn’t know if that was an appropriate thing to tell a new boyfriend. However, he genuinely seemed interested, and then I went on to tell him about my passion for drama. He was a good listener, I admired him for that. Even though we were having this lovely chat, at the back of my mind I wasn’t relaxed at all. Something wasn’t sitting well with me; I then realised it was because of the pizza I had ordered. I kept asking myself a lot of questions, what if the pizza isn’t the type of food I enjoy, what will I do? What if it was something chilli? I didn’t like food with chilli, the thought of it made me sick in my tummy. I kept wondering if I would make a fool of myself when the pizza finally came? If I did, what would Khettie think of me? These questions kept bothering me.

At last the pizza came. It was something I had never seen before but it looked yummy! Khettie began eating his pizza; he seemed to be enjoying himself and I realised that maybe it wasn’t that bad after all. However, something else astonished me; he was eating with a fork and knife! How can someone eat with both a fork and knife at the same time? I now paid full attention to what he was doing, wondering will I be able to do that? I waited, scared to make a move. I was hungry but hesitant to start eating my pizza since I was worried how was I going to eat with those? Well, a fork is more understandable, unlike a knife, I thought to myself. Khettie soon noticed that I was not eating and asked, ‘Why are you not eating?’ With a shaking voice, I responded, feeling ashamed, ‘I don’t know how to eat using both a fork and knife at the same time.’

He looked up at me with wide eyes and then laughed. I was hurt, how can he laugh at me. When he saw tears coming to my eyes, he stopped and said, ‘Oh Annie, I’m sorry, I thought you were joking.’ I was no longer interested in what he wanted to say next. I excused myself from the table and ran to the bathroom. He stood up and followed me. When I entered the ladies room, I could hear him calling me. I ignored him and shut the door behind me. I was furious and ashamed at the same time and then went straight to the mirror and looked at my face. I was able to breathe in and out for a moment and take in what had just happened. Khettie was a nice person, this was one thing I had noticed about him during the previous weeks we had started hanging out. So I cooled down and opened the door. Leaning against the door of the bathroom, he held my hand and apologised. I fell for his charm and we went back to our table smiling at each other. He demonstrated to me how to use a fork and knife.

The pizza tasted delicious but because of the humiliation I had put myself through, I didn’t fully enjoy it. I wanted to go back to campus. So I lied, ‘Khettie, I have an assignment due tomorrow. Do you mind if we go back to campus, please?’ I think he must have realised I was lying; he just nodded his head and then asked me to wait for him to finish eating. He said I could take mine with me; he called the waiter and asked him to wrap my pizza as we had to hurry back to campus. I felt relieved when we left the restaurant.

*****

When I arrived in campus after Khettie had accompanied me, I was in a hurry to taste and explore my pizza without any audience this time. However, it was cold and tasted funny as it kept on making cracky sounds whenever I tried eating it. As time went on, Khetthie was always busy and with that we ended up going our separate ways. I believe he realised I wasn’t that type of girl he was looking for. Soon he lost interest in me and never invited me to a second date… lol.

“O sole mio sta ‘nfronte a te…” Mario’ s light tenor voice rings out with desperate longing while singing the old Neapolitan song.  We are sitting on the front steps of our house in the gathering dusk, looking for the first stars to make their appearance in the sky above the row of poplars closer to the road. There is a smell of freshly mowed grass, and when the gentle breeze stirs the leaves a little, one can even smell a faint whiff of cow dung coming from the cow sheds.  Guiseppe sits one step above us.  Like Mario he wears a snow-white short-sleeved vest and long khaki trousers with brown army boots, and he softly sings along.  I know the words of most of their songs and when I sing along they smile, look at each other and say “Che bella voce, you be opera singer one day.”

I am curious. “Opera singer? What does an opera singer do?”

“Ah, seeng, of course, and make a lotsa money!”

Mario can scarcely comprehend that anyone in the world does not know what an opera singer is, even if it is an inquisitive seven-year-old girl with long brown plaits on the southern tip of Africa, many miles away from his beloved Bologna. In his quaint English he tells me of the marvels of opera and I listen, enraptured. Could it be that there is a place, far from here, in the wonderful country called Italy where they come from, where you can enthral people with your singing and also make a living from it? My father often reads to us aloud from the Bible about earning your bread by the sweat of your brow, and here Mario tells this incongruous tale of earning a living just by dressing in beautiful clothes and singing on stage. Mario is a great story teller and perhaps this is just one of the stories he tells to amuse me.

By the time Mario sings “La donna é mobile” from Rigoletto, Guiseppe gets up to help my mother prepare supper in the kitchen. He ducks under the strings of laboriously handmade pasta on lines stretching the length of our big kitchen, before he carefully gathers some of it for the big pot of boiling water on the stove. Our Italians do not think much of our local pasta and rather make their own, no matter how much time it takes.

My mother, wearing one of her embroidered aprons, stands in front of the Ellis de Luxe coal stove from where she supervises the kitchen activities. Guiseppe also regularly kneads the dough for the three loaves of brown bread that we need every day, while my mother stands next to him with a white cloth in her hand with which she occasionally dabs the perspiration from his forehead and face. We are all longing for soft white bread, but there is a war raging somewhere, far away, and it is prohibited to use white flour and to eat white bread, so we have to be content with brown bread.

Soon the entire family – my parents, three big brothers, my elder sister, Mario, Guiseppe and I – sit around the big oak table with the golden glow of the oil lamp overhead. From where I sit between my parents I smell the divine aroma rising from the freshly baked bread, the herby pasta sauce and the salad, glistening with the oily dressing that the Italians prefer, even though they bemoan the fact that real olive oil is not available. I can hardly wait for my father to say grace. We all close our eyes, father thanks God for what we are about to receive, the Italians cross themselves and, as one big family, we start our evening meal.

***

“Our Italians” were prisoners of war. They were captured in Somalia and Abyssinia during the Second World War and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp at Zonderwater near Pretoria. My father owned a small dairy at Largo on the edge of the East Rand, and needed to expand the cow sheds and cooling rooms, so he applied for permission to employ some of the prisoners of war from Zonderwater. And that is how Mario and Guiseppe and, after them, Rafaello, Antonio and Peppino became part of our lives and an important part of my youthful thinking and future development.

Gentle Mario was my favourite among the Italians. I liked the way he always sang while working. Singing came to him as naturally as breathing. He had a gentleness about him that matched his soft-grained voice. His brown eyes were rather sad, even though he often smiled showing even white teeth in a healthy sun-tanned face.

Guiseppe was taller, more cynical and sported an Errol Flynn moustache below his elegant Roman nose. Homesick for his hometown of Mantua, he was disgusted by the never-ending war and in broken English told us how San Pietro is waiting for all the world leaders to condemn them to inferno. Teasingly, my father asked him but what about his own leader, Mussolini? Whereupon he became agitated: “Especially Mussolini! Inferno! Inferno! And he will have to walk with no shoes over very sharp nails to get there. Me, Guiseppe Corti, will stand there next to San Pietro to see that it happens.” With an expression of extreme pain on his face he demonstrated on tiptoe how he hoped this mighty leader of his nation would one day suffer.

My father tried to calm him by asking what would happen when he reached the Pearly Gates. Guiseppe’s expression softened: “Ah, mister Deysel, avanti in Paradiso” and with a sweeping gesture of his long arms he swept away all imaginary obstacles on the road to Paradise. My father was thrilled to hear that according to Oracle Guiseppe he would go straight to Paradise. We all laughed and tried to forget that there was a war raging thousands of miles away.

In the mornings Mario would take me, on the frame of our bicycle, to school some distance away and collect me again in the afternoons. Along the way he would tell me opera stories and talk longingly about his wife and baby. At home he showed us photographs of his moglie e bambino, his beautiful young wife and fat baby boy. When the time came for Mario and Guiseppe to return to camp after their allotted time with us, I was in tears. The stables and cooling rooms that they built were like monuments that reminded me of the magical time that they stayed with us.

The other men, Rafaello, Antonio and Peppino, who followed in their footsteps, did not make the same impression on me. After the war we received a few letters and postcards from Italy, but it stopped after a while. Little did Mario know that, with his stories of opera and through listening to their beautiful language and songs, a seed had been planted in my mind that would bear fruit in a wonderful way later in my life.

You can buy Magriet’s book FROM LARGO TO LARMENIER by emailing her here.

The day she died she cooked a pot of food

Pumpkin

The meat was browned in sugar

Dark and sweet

The pumpkin soft and thick

Mushy chunks of orange in brown gravy

Shining with the fat she cooked it in

Delicious stew.

The day she died my mother brought her pot

And filled it to the brim with

Pumpkin stew

Her mum knew

Best how to make a hearty meal

And steal a heart with food.

The day she died five beggars fed

From that same pot

Of pumpkin stew on bread

Wrapped in waxed paper

And the warmth of her tireless smile.

The day she died she washed out her pot

Wiped clean with bread

She had begrudged herself

The last beggar at the door

More hungry than she was.

The pot washed

The kitchen cleaned

She cleaned herself for prayer

Then bent to pray…

And was found that way

The day my granny died.